Vendetta

Wednesday, 01.50 – 02.45

Aurelio Zen lounged on the sofa like a listless god, bringing the dead back to life. With a flick of his finger he made them rise again. One by one the shapeless, blooddrenched bundles stirred, shook themselves, crawled about a bit, then floated upwards until they were on their feet again. This extremely literal resurrection had taken them by surprise, to judge by their expressions, or perhaps it was the sight of each others' bodies that was so shocking, the hideous injuries and disfigurements, the pools and spatters of blood everywhere. But as Zen continued to apply his miraculous intervention, all this was set to rights too: the gaping rents in flesh and fabric healed themselves, the blood mopped itself up, and in no time at all the scene looked almost like the ordinary dinner party it had been until the impossible occurred. None of the four seemed to notice the one remarkable feature of this spurious afterlife, namely that everything happened backwards.

'He did it.'

Zen's mother was standing in the doorway, her nightdress clutched around her skimpy form.

'What's wrong, mamma?'

She pointed at the television, which now showed a beach of brilliant white sand framed by smoothly curved rocks. A man was swimming backwards through the wavelets. He casually dived up out of the water, landed neatly on one of the rocks and strolled backwards to the shaded lounging chairs where the others sat sucking smoke out of the air and blowing it into cigarettes.

'The one in the swimming costume. He did it. He was in love with his wife so he killed him. He was in another one too, last week, on Channel Five. They thought he was a spy but it was his twin brother. He was both of them. They do it with mirrors.'

Mother and son gazed at each other across the room lit by the electronically preserved sunlight of a summer now more than three months in the past. It was almost two o'clock in the moming, and even the streets of Rome were hushed.

Zen pressed the pause button of the remote control unit, stilling the video.

'Why are you up, mamma?' he asked, trying to keep his irritation out of his voice. This was breaking the rules.

Once she had retired to her room, his mother never reappeared. It was respect for these unwritten laws that made their life together just about tolerable from his point of view.

'I thought I heard something.'

Their eyes still held. The woman who had given Zen life might have been the child he had never had, awakened by a nightmare and seeking comfort. He got up and walked over to her.

'I'm sorry, mamma. I turned the sound right down…'

'I don't mean the TV.'

He interrogated those bleary, evasive eyes more closely.

'What, then?'

She shrugged pettishly.

'A sort of scraping.'

'Scraping? What do you mean?'

'Like old Umberto's boat.'

Zen was often brought up short by his mother's references to a past which for her was infinitely more real than the present would ever be. He had quite forgotten Umberto, the portly, dignified proprietor of a general grocery near the San Geremia bridge. He used the boat to transport fruit and vegetables from the Rialto market, as well as boxes, cases, bottles and jars to and from the cellars of his house, which the ten-year-old Zen had visualized as an Aladdin's cave crammed with exotic delights. When not in use, the boat was moored to a post in the little canal opposite the Zens' house. The post had a tin collar to protect the wood, and a few moments after each vaporetto passed down the Cannaregio the wash would reach Umberto's boat and set it rubbing its gunwale against the collar, producing a series of metallic rasps.

'It was probably me moving around in here that you heard,' Zen told her. 'Now go back to bed, before you catch cold.'

'It didn't come from in here. It came from the other side.

Across the canal. Just like that damned boat.'

Zen took her by the arm, which felt alarmingly fragile.

Widowed by the war, his mother had confronted the world alone on his behalf, wresting concessions from tradesmen and bureaucrats, labouring at menial jobs to eke out her pension, cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending and making do, tirelessly and ingeniously hollowing out and shoring up a space for her son to grow up in. Small wonder, he thought, that the effort had reduced her to this pittance of a person, scared of noises and the dark, with no interest in anything but the television serials she watched, whose plots and characters were gradually becoming confused in her mind. Such motherhood as she had known was like those industrial jobs that leave workers crippled and broken, the only difference being that there was no one mothers could sue for damages.

Zen led her back into the musty bedroom she occupied at the back of the apartment, filled with the furniture she had brought with her from their home in Venice. The pieces were all elaborately carved from some wood as hard, dark and heavy as iron. They covered every inch of wall space, blocking up the fire escape as well as most of the window, which anyway she always kept tightly shuttered.

'Are you going to stay up and watch the rest of that film?' she asked as he tucked her in.

'Yes, mamma, don't worry, I'll be just in there. If you hear anything, it's only me.'

'It didn't come from in there! Anyway, I told you who did it. The skinny one in the swimming costume.'

'I know, mamma,' he murmured wearily. 'That's what everyone thinks.'

He wandered back to the living room just as two o'clock began to strike from the churches in the Vatican. Zen stood surveying the familiar faces locked up on the flickering screen. They were familiar not just to him, but to everyone who had watched television or looked at the papers that autumn. For months the news had been dominated by the dramatic events and still more sensational implications of the 'Burolo affair'.

In a way it was quite understandable that Zen's mother had confused the characters involved with the cast of a film she had seen. Indeed, it was a film that Zen was watching, but a film of a special kind, not intended for commercial release and only available to him, as an officer of the Criminalpol section of the Ministry of the Interior, in connection with the report he had been asked to prepare, summarizing the case to date. He wasn't really supposed to take it home, but the Ministry didn't run to video machines for its employees, even those of Vice-Questorial rank. So what was he supposed to do -Zen had demanded, in his ignorance of the nature of video tape – hold it up to the window, frame by frame?

He sat down on the sofa again, groped for the remote control unit and pressed the play button, releasing the blurred figures to laugh, chat and generally ham it up for the camera. They knew it was there, of course. Oscar Burolo made no secret of his mania for recording the highpoints of his life. On the contrary, every visitor to the entrepreneur's Sardinian hideaway had been impressed by the underground vault containing hundreds of video tapes, as well as computer discs all carefully shelved and indexed. Like all good libraries, Oscar's collection was constantly expanding. Indeed, shortly before his death a complete new section of shelving had been installed to accommodate the latest additions.

'But do you actually ever watch any of them'?' the guest might ask.

'I don't need to watch them,' Oscar would reply, smiling in a peculiar way. 'It's enough to know that they're there.'

If the six people relaxing at the water's edge were in any way uneasy about the prospect of having their antics preserved for posterity, they certainly didn't show it. An invitation to the Villa Burolo was so sought-after that no one was going to quibble about the conditions. Quite apart from the experience itself it was something to brag about at dinner parties for months to come. 'You mean to say you've actually been there?' people would ask, their envy showing like an ill-adjusted slip. 'Tell me, is it true that he has lions and tigers freely roaming the grounds and that the only way in is by helicopter?' Secure in the knowledge that no one was likely to contradict him, Oscar Burolo's ex-guest could freely choose whether to distort the facts and I solemnly assure you, I who have been there and seen it with my own eyes, that Burolo has a staff of over thirty servants – or rather slaves! – whom he bought, cash down, from the president of a certain African country or, in more sophisticated company, to suggest that the truth was actually stranger than the various lurid and vulgar fictions which had been circulating.

On the face of it, this degree of interest was itself almost the oddest feature of the business. Nothing could be more banal than for a rich Italian to buy himself a villa in Sardinia. By 'Sardinia', of course, one meant the Costa Smeralda on the northern coast of the island, which the Aga Khan had bought for a pittance from the local peasant farmers and turned into a holiday paradise for the superwealthy, a mini-state which sprang into being every summer for two months. Its citizens hailed from all parts of the world and from all walks of life: film stars, industrialists, sheikhs, politicians, criminals, pop singers, bankers. Their cosmopolitan enclave was protected by an extremely efficient private police force, but its internal regime was admirably democratic and egalitarian. Religious, political or racial discrimination were unknown. The only requirement was money, and lots of it.

As founder and owner of a construction company whose rapid success was almost uncanny, there was no question that Oscar Burolo satisfied that requirement. But instead of meekly buying his way into the Costa like everyone else, he did something unheard-of, something so bizarre and outlandish that some people claimed afterwards that they had always thought it was ill-omened from the start. For his Sardinian retreat, Oscar chose an abandoned farmhouse half-way down the island's almost ininhabited eastern coast, and not even on the sea, for god's sake, but several kilometres inland!

Italians have no great respect for eccentricity, and this kind of idiosyncrasy might very easily have aroused nothing but ridicule and contempt. It was a measure of the panache with which Oscar carried off his whims that exactly the opposite was the case. The full resources of Burolo Construction were brought to bear on the humble farmhouse, which was swiftly altered out of all recognition. One by one, the arguments against Oscar's choice were made to look small-minded and unconvincing.

The security aspect, so important in an area notorious for kidnappings, was taken care of by hiring the top firm in the country to make the villa intruder-proof, no expense spared. Used to having to cut corners to make security cost-effective, the consultant was delighted for once to have an opportunity to design a system without compromises. 'If anyone ever manages to break into this place, I'll believe in ghosts,' he assured his client when the work was completed. Having purchased peace of mind with hard cash, Oscar then added a characteristic touch by buying a pair of rather moth-eaten lions from a bankrupt safari park outside Cagliari and turning them loose in the grounds, calculating that the resulting publicity would do as much as any amount of high technology to deter intruders.

But even Oscar couldn't change the fact that the villa was situated almost zoo kilometres from the nearest airport and the glamorous nightspots of the Costa Smeralda, zoo kilometres of tortuous and poorly maintained road where no electronic fences could protect him from kidnappers. Wasn't that a drawback? Well it might be, Oscar retorted, for someone who still thought of personal transport in terms of cars. But Olbia and the Costa were only half that distance as the crow flies, and when the crow in question was capable of zzo kph… To clinch the argument, Oscar would bundle his guests into the 'crow' – an Agusta helicopter – and pilot them personally to Palau or Porto Cervo for aperitifs.

As for swimming, since Oscar would not go to the coast like everyone else, the coast was made to come to him. A wide irregular hollow the size of a small lake was scooped out of the parched red soil behind the farm. This was lined with concrete, filled with water and decorated with a sandy beach and wave-smoothed rocks dynamited and bulldozed out of the foreshore, barnacles and all. And the bamacles throve, because one of the biggest surprises awaiting Burolo's guests as they padded off for their first dip was that the water was salt. 'Fresh from the Mediterranean,' Oscar would explain proudly, 'pumped up here through 5,437 metres of sixty-centimetre duct, filtered for impurities, agitated by six asynchronous wave simulators and continuously monitored to maintain a constant level of salinity.' Oscar liked using words like 'asynchronous' and 'salinity' and quoting squads of figures: it clinched the effect which the villa was already beginning to have on his listener. But he knew when to stop, and at this point would usually slap his guest on the back – or, if it was a woman, place his hand familiarly at the base of her spine, just above the buttocks – and say, 'So what's missing, except for a lot of fish and crabs and lobsters? Mind you, we have those too, but they know their place here – on a plate!'

Zen paused the video again as footsteps sounded in the street outside. A car door slammed shut. But instead of the expected sound of the car starting up and driving away, the footsteps returned the way they had come, ceasing somewhere close by.

He walked over to the window and opened the shutters.

The wooden jalousies beyond the glass were closed, but segments of the scene outside were visible by looking down through the angled slats. Both sides of the street were packed with cars, parked on the road, on either side of the trees lining it and all over the pavement. Some distance from the house a red saloon was parked beyond all these, all by itself, facing towards the house. It appeared to be empty.

The scene was abruptly plunged into darkness as the street-lamp attached to the wall just below went out.

Something had gone wrong with its automatic switch, so that the lamp was continually fooled into thinking that its own light was that of the dawn and therefore turned itself off. Then, after some time, it would start to glow faintly again, gradually growing brighter and brighter until the whole cycle repeated itself.

Zen closed the shutters and walked back to the sofa.

Catching sight of his reflection in the large mirror above the fireplace, he paused, as though the person he saw there might hold the key to what was puzzling him. The prominent bones and slight tautness of the skin especially around the eyes, gave his face a slightly exotic air, probably due to Slav or even Semitic blood somewhere in the family's Venetian past. It was a face that gave nothing away, yet seemed always to tremble on the brink of some expression that never quite appeared. His face had made Zen's reputation as an interrogator, for it was a perfect screen on to which others could project their own suspicions, fears and apprehensions. Where other policemen confronted criminals, using the carrot or the stick, according to the situation, Zen's subjects found themselves shut up with a man who barely seemed to exist, yet who mirrored back to them the innermost secrets of their hearts. They read their every fleeting emotion accurately imaged on those scrupulously blank features, and knew that they were lost.

Like all the other furniture in the apartment, the mirror was old without being valuable, and the silvering was wearing off in places. One particularly large worn patch covered much of Zen's chest, reminding him of the last terrible scenes of the video he was watching, of Oscar Burolo reeling away from the shotgun blasts which had come from nowhere, passing through the elaborate electronic defences of his property as though they did not exist.

With a shiver, Zen deliberately stepped to one side, moving the stain of darkness away. There was something about the Burolo case which was differeht from any other he had ever been involved in. He had known cases which obsessed him professionally, taking over his life until he was unable to sleep properly or to think about anything else, but this was even more disturbing. It was as though the aura of mystery and horror surrounding the killings had extended itself even to him, as though he too was somehow in danger from the faceless power which had ravaged the Villa Burolo. This was absurd, of course. The case was closed, an arrest had been made, and Zen's involvement with it was temporary, second-hand and superficial. But despite that the sensation of menace remained, and the sound of footsteps was enough to make him rush to the window, a car parked half-way down the street seemed to pose some threat.

The fact was that it was time to go to bed, long past it in fact. He walked back to the sofa and picked up his crumpled pack of Nazionali cigarettes, considered briefly whether to have one more before turning in, decided against it, then lit up anyway. He yawned and glanced at his watch. A quarter past two. No wonder he was feeling so strange. Seen through the mists of sleeplessness, everything had the insubstantial, fluid quality of a dream. He picked up the remote control, pressed the play button and tried to concentrate on the screen again.

You had to hand it to Oscar! No doubt the camera angle had been carefully chosen, but it was really very difficult to believe that this beach, these rocks, those plashing wavelets were not part of a natural coastline, but a swimming pool five kilometres inland. As for the members of the group sitting around the table in the shadow of a huge green and blue parasol, toying with iced drinks, packs of cards and magazines full of games and puzzles, they were fairly typical of anyone who might have been found at the villa on any given day during July and August that summer. Besides Oscar and his wife there were only four guests: Burolo assiduously preserved the mystique of the villa by restricting the number of visitors, thus increasing their sense of being privileged intimates. His excuse was that the household was not able to cope with huge parties.

Despite the tall tales of resident slave communities, Oscar's staff was in fact limited to an elderly caretaker and wife, together with a young man who had come with the lions and also helped to look after the garden. Oscar made much of being a self-made man with no wish for ostentatious display. 'I am what I am,' he declared, 'a simple builder and nothing more.' The truth was that he had realized that it was easier to dominate and manipulate small groups than large ones. The video made this very clear. In every scene, inside or out, it was the host himself who was invariably the focus of attention. Lounging on his personalized beach in silver shorts and a clashing pink and blue silk shirt, his head exaggerated in size as though by a caricaturist's pen, Oscar looked like the love child of the Michelin man and an overweight gorilla. One of his unsuccessful rivals had remarked that anyone who still doubted the theory of evolution obviously hadn't met Oscar Burolo. But it was a waste of time trying to be witty at Oscar's expense. He promptly took up the story, telling it himself with great relish, and concluding, 'Which is why I've survived and Roberto's gone to the wall, like the dinosaur he is!' Oscar the ebullient, the irrepressible Oscar!

Nothing could touch him, or so it seemed.

Such was the spell cast by Burolo that it was only by an effort of attention that one became aware of the others present. The slightly saturnine man with thinning grey hair and a wedge-shaped face sitting to Oscar's left was a Sicilian architect named Vianello who had collaborated with Burolo Construction on the plans for a new electricity generating station at Rieti. Unfortunately their tender had been rejected on technical grounds – a previously unheard-of eventuality – and the contract had gone to another firm. Dottor Vianello was wearing an immaculate pale cream cotton suit and a slightly strained smile, possibly due to the fact that he was having to listen to Oscar's wife's account of an abortive shopping trip to Olbia. Rita Burolo had once been an exceptionally attractive woman, and the sense of power which this had given her had remained, even now that her charms were visibly wilting.

Her inane comments had commanded total attention for so long that Rita had at last come to believe that she had more to offer the world than her legs and breasts, which was a consolation now that the latter were no longer quite first-division material. Opposite her sat the Sicilian architect's wife, a diminutive pixie of a woman with frightened eyes and a faint moustache. Maria Pia Vianello gazed at the spectacle of her hostess in full career with a kind of awestruck amazement, like a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher. Clearly, she would never dream of tryin8 to dominate a gathering in this way.

Despite these superficial dissimilarities, however, the Vianellos and the Burolos basically had much in common.

No longer young, but rich enough to keep age at bay for a few years yet, the men ponderous with professional gravitas, like those toy figurines which cannot be knocked over because they are loaded with lead, the women exuding the sullen peevishness of those who have been pampered with every luxury except freedom and responsibility. The remaining couple were different.

Zen reversed the tape again briefly, hauling the swimmer up out of the water once more, and then froze the picture, studying the man who had dominated the news for the previous three months. Renato Favelloni's sharp, ferrety features and weak chest and limbs, coupled with greasy hair and an over-ready smile, gave him the air of a small-town playboy, by turns truculent and toadying, convinced of being God's gift to the world in general and women in particular, but quite prepared to lower himself to any dirty work in the interests of getting ahead. At first Zen had found it almost incomprehensible that such a man could have been the linchpin of the deals that were rumoured to have taken place between Oscar Burolo and the senior political figure who was referred to in the press as '1'onorevole', the formula reputedly used by Burolo in his secret memoranda of their relationship. Only gradually had he come to understand that it was precisely Favelloni's blatant sleaziness which made him acceptable as a go-between. There are degrees even in the most cynical corruption and manipulation. By embodying the most despicable possible grade, Renato Favelloni made his clients feel relatively decent by comparison.

His wife, like Renato himself, was a good ten years younger than the other four people present, and exactly the kind of stunning bimbo that Rita Burolo must have been at the same age. This cannot have recommended Nadia Favelloni to Oscar's wife any more than the younger woman's habit of wandering around the place half-naked.

Having reached the age at which women begin to employ clothing for purposes of concealment rather than display, Signora Burolo discreetly retained a flowing wrap of some material that was a good deal less transparent than it first appeared.

A sense of revulsion suddenly overcame Zen at the thought of what was shortly to happen to that pampered, veiled flesh. Vanity, lust, jealousy, boredom, bitchiness, beauty, wit – what did any of it matter? As the doomed faces glanced flirtatiously at the camera, wondering how they were coming across, Zen felt like screaming at them, 'Go away! Get out of that house now!'

The Favellonis had done precisely that, of course, which was one reason why everyone in Italy from the magistrate investigating the case to the know-all in your local bar agreed with Zen's mother that Renato Favelloni was 'the one who did it'. With the seedy fixer and his disturbingly bare-breasted wife out of the way, the two maturer couples had settled down to a quiet dinner in the villa's dining room, with its rough tiled floor and huge trestle table which had originally graced the refectory of a Franciscan monastery. The meal had been eaten and coffee and liqueurs served when Oscar once again switched on the camera to record the after-dinner talk, dominated as always by his booming, emphatic voice, punctuated by blows of his hairy fist on the table-top.

Apart from a distant metallic crash whose source and relevance were in dispute, the first sign of what was about to happen appeared in Signora Vianello's nervous eyes.

The architect's wife was sitting next to their host, who was in the middle of a bawdy tale concerning a well-known TV presenter and a stripper turned member of parliament who had appeared on his talk show, and what they had reputedly got up to during the commercial break. Maria Pia Vianello had been listening with a vague, blurry smile, as though she wasn't quite sure whether it was proper for her to appear to understand. Then her eyes were attracted by something on the other side of the room, something which made such considerations irrelevant. The vague smile abruptly vanished, leaving her features completely blank.

No one else had noticed anything. The only sound in the room was Oscar's voice. Whatever Signora Vianello had seen was on the move, and her eyes tracked it across the room until Oscar saw it too. He broke off in midsentence, threw his napkin on the table and stood up.

'What do you want?'

There was no answer, no sound whatever. Oscar's wife and Dottor Vianello, who were sitting with their backs to the camera, looked round. Rita Burolo emitted a scream of terror. Vianello's expression did not change, except to harden slightly.

'What do you want?' Burolo repeated, his brows knitted in puzzlement and annoyance. Abruptly, he pushed his chair aside and strode towards the intruder, staring masterfully downwards as though to cow an unruly child.

You could say what you liked, thought Zen, but the man had guts. Or was he just foolhardy, trying to show off to his guests, to preserve an image of bravado to the last? At all events, it was only in the final moment that any fear entered Oscar's eyes, as he flung up his hands in an instinctive attempt to protect his face.

A brutal eruption of noise swamped the soundtrack.

Literally disintegrated by the blast, Oscar's hands disappeared, while bright red blotches appeared all over his face and neck like an instant infection. He reeled away, holding up the stumps of his wrists. Somehow he managed to recover his balance and turn back, only to receive the second discharge, which carried away half his chest and flung him against the corner of the dining table, where he collapsed in a bloody heap at his wife's feet.

Rita Burolo scrambled desperately away from the corpse as Vianello dived under the table, a pistol appearing in his hand. The ratchet sound of a shotgun being reloaded by pump action mingled with two sharp light cracks from the architect's pistol. Then the soundtrack was bludgeoned twice more in quick succession. The first barrel scoured the space below the table, gouging splinters out of the wood, shattering plates and glasses, wounding Signora Vianello terribly in the legs and reducing her husband to a nightmare figure crawling about on the floor like a tormented animal. The second caught Rita Burolo trying desperately to climb out of the window that lay open on to the terrace.

As she was further away than the others, the wounds she sustained were more dispersed, covering her in a spray as fine and evenly distributed as drizzle on a windscreen.

With a despairing cry she fell through the window to the paving stones of the terrace, where she slowly bled to death.

Despite her lacerated legs, Maria Pia Vianello somehow struggled to her feet. For all her diminutive stature, she too gave the impression of looking down at the intruder.

'Just a moment, please,' she muttered over the dry, clinical sound of the gun being reloaded. 'I'm afraid I'm not quite ready yet. I'm sorry.'

The shot took her at close range, flaying her so fearfully that loops of intestine protruded through the wall of her abdomen in places. Then the second barrel spun her round. She clutched the wall briefly, then collapsed into a dishevelled heap, leaving a complex pattern of dark streaks on the whitewashed plaster.

It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would appear, having run from the two-room service flat where he and his wife had been watching a variety show on television. Until then, apart from wine dripping from a broken bottle at the edge of the table and a swishing caused by the convulsive twitches of the dying Vianello's arm, there was no sound whatsoever. 'If anyone ever manages to break into this place, I'll believe in ghosts,' the security analyst had assured Oscar Burolo. Nevertheless, someone or something had got in, butchered the inhabitants and then vanished without trace, all in less than a minute and in perfect silence. Even in broad daylight and the company of others it was difficult to ignore this almost supernatural dimension of the killings. In the eerie doldrums of the night, all alone, it seemed impossible to believe that there could be a rational explanation for them.

The silence of the running tape was broken by a distant scraping sound. Zen felt his skin crawl and the hairs on his head stir. He reached for the remote control unit and stilled the video. The noise continued, a low persistent scraping. 'Like old Umberto's boat,' his mother had said.

Zen walked quietly across to the inner hallway of the apartment, opened the door to his mother's bedroom and looked inside.

'Can you hear it?' a voice murmured in the darkness.

'Yes, mamma.'

'Oh good. I thought it might be me, imagining it. I'm not quite right in the head sometimes, you know.'

He gazed towards the invisible bed. It was the first time that she had ever made such an admission. They were both silent for some time, but the noise did not recur.

'Where is it coming from?' he asked.

'The wardrobe.'

'Which wardrobe?'

There were three of them in the room, filled with clothes that no one would ever wear again, carefully preserved from moths by liberal doses of napthalene, which gave the room its basic funereal odour.

'The big one,' his mother replied.

The biggest wardrobe occupied the central third of the wall giving on to the internal courtyard of the building. Its positioning had occasioned Zen some anxiety at the time, since it obstructed access to the fire escape, but the wardrobe was too big to fit anywhere else.

Zen walked over to the bed and straightened the counterpane and sheets. Then he patted the hand which emerged from the covers, all the obsolete paraphenalia of muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the parchment-like skin.

'It was just a rat, mamma.'

The best way of dispelling her formless, childish fears was by giving her a specific unpleasantness to focus on.

'But it sounded like metal.'

'The skirting's lined with zinc,' he improvised. 'To stop them gnawing through. I'll speak to Giuseppe in the morning and we'll get the exterminators in. You try and get sorne sleep now.'

Back in the living room, he turned off the television and reound the video tape, trying to dispel his vague sense of unease by thinking about the report which he had to write the next day. It was the lateness of the hour that made everything seem strange and threatening now, the time when – according to what his uncle had once told him -a house belongs not to the people who happen to live there now, but to all those who have preceded them over the centuries. Tomorrow morning everything would have snapped back into proportion and the uncanny aspects of the Burolo case would seem mere freakish curiosities. The only real question was whether to mention them at all. It wasn't that he wanted or needed to conceal anything. For that matter he wouldn't have known where to begin, since he had no idea who the report was destined for. The problem was that there were certain aspects of the Burolo case which were very difficult to mention without laying yourself open to the charge of being a credulous nincompoop. For example, the statement made by the sevenyear-old daughter of Oscar Burolo's lawyer, who had visited the villa in late July. As a special treat she had been allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults, and in the excitement of the moment had sneaked some of her father's coffee, with the result that she couldn't sleep. It was a luminous summer night, and eventually the child left her room and set out to explore the house. According to her statement, in one of the rooms in the older part of the villa she saw a figure moving about. 'At first I was pleased,' she said. 'I thought it was a child, and I was lonely for someone to play with. But then i remembered that there were no children at the villa. I got scared and ran back to my room.'

Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately, it was no part of Zen's brief to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed as a concise report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There was nothing left to do except sit down and write the thing, and this he would do the next morning, while it was all fresh in his mind. By the afternoon, the Burolo affair would have no more significance for him than for any other member of the public.

Once again, footsteps sounded in the street below. A few minutes later the silence was abruptly shattered as a car started up and accelerated away with a squeal of tyres.

By the time Zen reached the window it had already passed far beyond the area of street visible through the closed jalousies. The sound of its engine gradually faded away, echoing and reverberating ever more distantly through the intersecting channels of streets. The streetlight was in its waxing phase, and as the light gradually intensified

Zen saw that the red car which had been parked further along the street was no longer there. He closed the shutters, wondering why its presence or absence should be of any concern to him. Finding no answer, he decided it was time to go to bed.

Nearly over now. Everything's going, the doubfs, the fears, the cares,'.the confusion, even the pain. All draining away of its own accord. There's nothing I need do, nothing more to be done.

When I saw him standing there, the gun in his hand, it was like seeing myself in a mirror. He had taken my part, emerging from nowhere, implacable, confident, unsurprised. He sounded impatient, taunting me with a strange name, threatening me.

'There's no point in trying to hide,' he said. 'Let's get it over with. ' As usual, I did what I was told.

He cried out, in rage and disbelief. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't that. Then something overwhelmed me, knocking me over, opening me up. I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to. It wasn't like the prst time, the man under the table wounding me with his pistol. All he gave me was pain. This was different. I knew at once that I was carrying a death.

It won't be long now. Already I feel light and insubstantial, as though I were dissolving. The darkness is on the move, billowing out to enshroud me, winding me in its endless folds. Everything is in flux. Solid rock gives way at my touch, the ground flows beneath me as though the river had returned to its courses, unexplored caverns burst open like preworks as I advance. I am lost, I who know this place better than I know my own body!